PUTRAJAYA, 30 Dec 2008: A total of 26,378 students or 5.96% of the 2008 Penilaian Menengah Rendah (PMR) candidates scored grade A in all subjects they sat for compared to 5.65% in 2007 and 4.83% in 2006.

Education director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom said the PMR results this year was better than last year in terms of the number of candidates getting grade A to E in the subjects they had taken.

“The results in all subjects, except for Geography and Arabic Communication, are better than last year with English achieving the highest increase by 3.6%,” he said when announcing the results here today.

He said the disparity in the performance between urban and rural candidates have narrowed especially in Bahasa Melayu, English, Mathematics and Science.

The number of rural students who obtained grade A in Mathematics increased by 2.7% compared with urban students (2.1%) while in Science, rural students who obtained grade A went up by 0.3% while the performance of urban students dropped by 0.3%.

“The reduced disparity shows that the second thrust of the Education Strategic Planning in the Education Development Masterplan, that is to bridge the performance gap between urban and rural students, has met its objectives,” he said.

On the number of candidates who failed to achieve the minimum standard by scoring at least grade D in all subjects, he said the figure had reduced from 63.53% last year to 62.93% this year.

On the number of students who scored grade E in all subjects, he said they accounted for 440 candidates (0.10%) compared to 559 candidates (0.13%) in 2007 and 524 (0.13%) in 2006.

“The majority of the candidates achieved better than grade C in 12 subjects and this is commendable,” he said.

Alimuddin said it was encouraging to notice that the number of students answering Science and Mathematics papers in English had increased.

He said 51.2% of the candidates answered Science papers in English this year compared to 21.5% last year, and 26.9% tackled Mathematics questions in English compared to 4.6% last year. — Bernama